Cartoon Network places LED boards with ATHF characters in various cities around the country, as part of a marketing campaign. Some crazy paranoid Bostonian thinks the blinking ad might be a ter’rist threat and calls the cops. So the bomb squad comes in and defuses the blinking lights, while the internets laugh. At this point, […]
First, an interesting article from the Telegraph, dating from back in May, which I’ve only read recently. Apparently, the United States had ordered some $400 million of weapons and ammunition from Russia (!) to equip Hamid Karzai’s army:
Pentagon chiefs have asked arms suppliers for a quote on a vast amount of ordnance, including more than […]
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals are unconstitutional. Interestingly, the court decided that even though the military commissions violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Code of Military Justice, they were not illegal per se; what was illegal was the fact that Bush set them up by executive order, without […]
Today in the morning, three Guantanamo Bay inmates — two Saudis and a Yemeni — were found dead in their cells. They had committed suicide by hanging themselves with bedsheets.
If you are held in a solitary chainlink pen for years without trial or evidence, and with no hope of release, I imagine you would also […]
Ben Griffin was a British paratrooper who served with distinction in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, and Afghanistan. In early 2004, he joined the SAS, Britain’s elite special services, and was deployed in Baghdad alongside America’s Delta Force. In March 2005, after 3 months in Iraq, he quit the British Army, citing disgust at the legality of […]
The Guantanamo Bay facility and the rest of CIA’s secret jails are mostly outside of any normal Western judicial system. There are no juries, no judges, no lawyers, no witnesses, no appeals. There is only a (hardly impartial) military commission which may hear your case years after you are detained or kidnapped. Yet some people […]
The US administration is proposing a policy of first nuclear strike against enemies — both states and non-states — that are “intending to use WMD” against US or allied targets. Besides the immorality of such a policy, the fact is that the current administration has consistently misled the US public about other nations’ WMD capabilities. […]
The British government uses terrorism as an excuse to roll back civil rights by a century. The Home Office wants to be able to deport people to countries with strong torture records (apparently, following the lead of America — which has in several documented cases sent terror suspects captured in America straight to police torture […]
UF has a short and cute debunking of BSA’s methods for calculating world piracy levels.
I did not know that there is a gun on board every Soyuz spaceship. It has three barrels — two for shotgun ammunition and flares, one for rifle rounds — and apparently is very well-balanced. I suppose that if one misses […]
Apparently, US Congresspersons have finally heard of the infamous July 2002 Blair memo, and are holding an unofficial (but public) hearing about it. I am surprised that it took more than a month for news of the memo (revealed by the Sunday Times in early May of this year) to cross the Atlantic. Still, better […]
The Sunday Times has published a memo describing a meeting between Tony Blair, his advisors, and senior members of the British Cabinet, that took place on July 23, 2002. You can read the Sunday Times’ own analysis if you wish, but the memorandum speaks eloquently and for itself. By mid-2002, the US had made a […]
It has been alleged that US special forces are in Iran, marking bombing sites. If the rumors are true (they are certainly believable), based on past US military actions, one would estimate an invasion in about 6-18 months. What options does one have if one were the ruler of Iran? Stop developing nukes? Of course […]
PBS has an interesting interview with Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) about Iraq, Rumsfeld, Bush, and the state of today’s US Army. Basically, the US armed forces seem to be entering the intellectual dark ages, and Mr. Rumsfeld’s reality distortion field isn’t helping. The situation in Abu Ghraib, according to the general, […]